Just as the Blues Brothers played for an audience that likes both kinds of music--country and western--telcos seem to be settling into a pattern where they offer hosted UC services based both kinds of UC--Cisco and Microsoft. At Enterprise Connect last month, AT&T announced that it has made generally available the hosted Lync service that for years it has offered large enterprises on an ad hoc basis. Orange Business Services made a similar announcement a few weeks before. Telstra became the latest service provider in Australia to introduce a hosted UC service based on Cisco HCS, with Amcom and Gen-i already offering HCS-based services in the region.
Other telcos with longer-standing and well-publicized HCS services include Sprint, Verizon, Orange, BT, Damovo, eLoyalty, NTT, Telefonica and Vodafone, among others. (Warning: This is going to be a hyperlink-intensive post.) And those with hosted Lync services: AT&T, Verizon, CallTower, Intermedia, BT, COLT, and so forth. And switching back to Cisco, non-traditional service providers are getting in on the game, too, as evidenced by recent announcements from Ingram Micro and En Pointe...the latter of which seems to have been working on its service for more than a year.
As an aside, all carriers' hosted Lync services I've come across are based on Lync Server 2010, the same platform that enterprises deploy on premise, but in this case running in the carrier's network. Microsoft also has a version of Lync called Lync Multitenant Pack for Partner Hosting that's tailor-made for service provider hosting. But it's very immature compared with Lync Server, supporting a more limited set of features and not yet upgraded to Lync Server 2013.
Cisco HCS has also had feature parity issues compared with Unified Communication Manager, the company's on-premise UC solution. Cisco has actually bridged the feature parity gap with HCS version 9.0, but I'm still hearing carriers lament about a purported lack of feature parity between the two. I'm pretty sure the problem is that the lamenting carriers haven't upgraded to 9.0 yet.
Returning (briefly, I promise) to the Blues Brothers metaphor, in the movie, Bob's Country Bunker offered two kinds of music because that's what its customers demanded to hear. Likewise the reason behind so many telcos offering mainly Cisco- and/or Microsoft-based hosted UC services is that's what their customers are demanding...though this demand is typically expressed without chucking beer bottles at a chicken wire-encased stage. The benefit of this state of the market is that carriers' hosted UC services can be more or less tied to the Cisco and Microsoft investments that enterprise IT departments are making in-house.
Despite appearances, Cisco and Microsoft are not in fact the only game in town when it comes to platforms carriers use for their hosted UC services. Avaya just introduced what is essentially its answer to HCS. Elka Popova provided a thorough overview of Avaya's new cloud platform, and I posted some thoughts on it for Ovum clients. A few additional details: Avaya Cloud Enablement for UC and Contact Center can scale to 10,000 UC endpoints, and support up to 256 tenants on a single multi-tenant platform. The hosted contact center component is based on Elite rather than Avaya Aura Contact Center...though I failed to ask about scalability of the hosted contact center platform. Perhaps some kind soul at Avaya will add that in the comments field below.
Though Avaya has lagged behind its chief rival Cisco in developing and delivering a hosted UC platform, Avaya has a number of partners--both large and small--that have lined up to offer services based on it. Verizon is the big name here. The carrier has built a hosted service that it's offering to a large private-sector customer. Belgacom and Cirque are also offering Avaya-based hosted UC services in Europe, while Salmat has an Avaya-powered hosted contact center service available in Australia.
Meanwhile, Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise last month for the first time publicly disclosed the names of some partners offering hosted UC services based on the OpenTouch Enterprise Cloud platform. These are smaller regional providers, but a dozen or more other service providers are also said to be also developing hosted UC services powered by OpenTouch.
Mitel has long had a hosted UC platform--the Mitel Multi-instance Communications Director (MiCD)--that service providers can leverage to build hosted UC services. But with Mitel, things start to get fuzzy as to who is in fact providing the hosted UC service. This is because in addition to selling technology on which its partners can build and offer hosted UC services, Mitel also offers a hosted UC service of its own. This is unlike Avaya, which (with the minor exception of AvayaLive Connect) only sells technology to service providers, and unlike Cisco that (with the not-so-minor exception of WebEx and WebEx Telepresence) does the same; and unlike Microsoft (with the big huge exception of Lync Online)...ok, it's not unlike Microsoft at all, really.
So last month when Mitel made its hosted UC announcement with Sprint, it wasn't that Sprint had built a UC service based on MiCD, but rather that Sprint would be marketing Mitel's hosted UC service, Mitel AnyWare. Mitel has a number of other partners associated with its hosted UC solutions and services, but I haven't begun to figure out which are reselling Mitel AnyWare and which are building their own services based on MiCD.
Siemens Enterprise--with the OpenScape UC Hosted Edition solution on the one hand and OpenScape Cloud services on the other--is another vendor that straddles this particular fence. As is Genband, with its Experius solution and Nuvia service.
The take-away, I suppose, is that with so much marketing noise around hosted UC services based on Cisco and Microsoft technology, it's easy to mischaracterize the market as revolving solely around them. In fact, the hosted UC market is much more complex and undergoing an incredible amount of change at the moment. Eventually carriers will standardize on hosted UC platforms that allow them to differentiate their services from one another. And vendors will work out whether offering UC services of their own is a viable opportunity or just a new path toward channel conflict. Until then, expect this space to be messy and to get messier.
Follow Brian Riggs on Twitter and Google+!
@brian_riggs
Brian Riggs on Google+
